The World Wide Web has expanded to provide numerous web services to consumers. The web services may be provided by a web application which uses multiple services and applications to handle a transaction. The applications may be distributed over several machines, making the topology of the machines that provide the service more difficult to track and monitor.
Monitoring a web application helps to provide insight regarding bottle necks in communication, communication failures and other information regarding performance of the services that provide the web application. When monitoring applications that occur over multiple servers, determining what is happening for a particular application may often be difficult. Something occurring on a different server or different tier of application notes may often affect a remote application. Typically, the only way to detect a cause of such a problem is to review the performance data of each and every application on multiple servers manually. This is a large undertaking that takes a lot of time, and is not very efficient in solving problems. What is needed is an improved method for addressing issues with performance of tiers of applications that might affect individual application performance.